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A Painting of Heaven

I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon: When a whole crowd …

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Imber

Imber is a village on Salisbury plain, requisitioned by the Army during WW2 for street-fighting exercises and never handed back to the displaced inhabitants. After much negotiation and some mine-sweeping, the Army recently gave Artangel permission for a one-night performance there, with music by Giya Kancheli. There’s lots of detail on the Artangel site, including an interview with Kancheli. I’ve no idea how I managed to miss this. There’s a review on the Independent site, which makes a point about context: The fact is, we weren’t focusing on the real tragedy – unmentioned in the advance publicity – which lies …

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Monochromes Of London

Sitting outside at The Approach with a pint of Prospect ale, enjoying the lingering Indian summer. Just visited the Wilkinson Gallery, which is exhibiting David Batchelor’s The Found Monochromes Of London 1-80 (1999-2003): …the culmination of four years’ work during which time Batchelor photographed over 100 simple white rectangles found in the streets. Presented as a slideshow, it’s very cool. The found rectangles form the centre of each picture, with a background of urban London spilling around the edges of this blank focus. The series has a lingering Entrances To Hell kind of effect after leaving the gallery, changing the …

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Are Metaphors Arbitrary?

We suggest that the nonarbitrariness both of synaesthesia and of metaphor (and their directionality) arise because of constraints imposed by evolution and by neural hardware (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a). For example, you say loud shirt but you rarely say red sound; you say sharp taste but rarely bitter touch.S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 10, No. 8, 2003

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Wood Car

If the Eameses had applied their fabrication skills to the design brief of the Citroen 2CV, during a serious fuel shortage, they might have ended up with something like Joost Conijn’s beautiful (the photo [now lost (2013)] doesn’t do it justice) wood-burning, plywood Hout Auto (Wood Car), currently exhibited at the NICC space of the Koninklijk Museum voor Shone Kunsten Antwerpen. An accompanying video documents the car’s rambling journey through the mountain passes and pot-holed backroads of central Europe, avoiding major routes. According to the NICC website: The artist travels towards the unknown. The main plan is to make a …

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Matt Webb’s Glancing Software

Matt’s been working on some glanceware (independently of what we’re doing here). At the moment it’s a simple way of seeing very basic presence information about a group of friends, whcih sits in the taskbar of your screen. He believes, if I understand correctly, that peripherally-attended presence is the seed on which can grow the pearl of complex social interaction. I’m interested to see where this leads: I think he’s following a similar train of thought to the audible presence cues in Hubbub, although personally I prefer the idea of audio cues, as they don’t require screen-based attention for them …

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Antwerp

On the Eurostar on the way back from Antwerp. I love it: I have no idea how their economy really works, but the city feels almost empty of people, yet somehow accomodates not just the Antwerp Six and their successors, but some of most lovely restaurants, bars and design shops I’ve ever seen. Oh and of course the art. They’ve somehow jumped straight past the service and information economies to some impossible present where all this is somehow self-supporting and profoundly civilised.

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Moving

Spent the day packing things into large orange crates. We’re moving the day after tomorrow. New address is 19 Victoria Mills9 Boyd StreetLondon E1 1NH Of the area I know nothing apart from the proximity of both the Bell Foundry and the site of one of the Ripper murders. Nice.

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Heat

Hottest day in recorded history in the UK today (37.9°C at Heathrow). In Birmingham, sudden deluge and seriously sinuous forked lightning over the village pub where we were having lunch. The electricity cut out, candlelight at 2pm under the darkness of the storm. Fourteen people injured from a lightning strike at a football match in Birmingham, others elsewhere. On the train back to London, more lightning at Northampton. Hoping the storm makes it to London before we do, to cool things down. Peter Weir’s The Last Wave feels like required viewing when we get home.

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Beer and Bells

At the end of the sevententh century it was estimated that beer accounted for 28 percent of the nation’s total expenditure …according to Pete Brown’s Man Walks Into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer. He is of course talking about Britain. I’m on a train to Birmingham for the weekend (with a beer). Been busy hunting for a new house, and working. Moving next weekend to just around the corner from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. View of Docklands and the City. We need to buy architectural salvage gryphons for the corners of the terrace for that Ghostbusters effect…

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